Precocious autobiography analysis

“A Precocious Autobiography” is a conventional short story about a boy who is forced to live on the streets and contend with the street bully.
It is an account of the consequences of his very first piece of poetry as a youth in Moscow.
In A Precocious Autobiography, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko gives an account of the first three decades of his life—hence, the title “precocious”—before.

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‘A Precocious Autobiography’ by Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, follows the story around the how he came to write his first poem and how this helped shape him as a person.

This first thing that becomes evident to me is the emphasis on Yevtushenko being alone,

“living alone in an empty apartment…My parents were divorced…My father was somewhere in Kazakhstan with his new wife and their two children. I seldom received letters from him. My mother was at the front…giving concerts for the troops”.

This foregrounding emphasised Yevtushenko’s feeling of abandonment from his parents.

I then noticed the use of repetition of the word “street” in the paragraphs that followed. Yevtushenko explains that the street educated him. By using this repetition of the word “street” throughout the text, it puts emphasis on the importance the street holds to Yevtushenko and his upbringing.

As this falls in the genre of an autobiography, it is of no surprise that this is written from Yevtushenko’s point of view. It is written in first person, which further allows us as readers to feel like

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maddiejane1

“A Precocious Autobiography” is a conventional short story about a boy who is forced to live on the streets and contend with the street bully Red. When I first read this story I thought it was just a typical brains winning over Braun with the main character learning jujitsu to defeat the giant bully (this was my initial interpretation of the story), once I re-read the story I kept a similar view. My literary repertoire consists of similar stories where the little guy or the underdog defeats the big tough guy and coming from a Christian background I grew up knowing the story of David and Goliath, which has the same denotation to this story.

However, it wasn’t until I started discussion with my classmates I started to form a completely different view. It seemed I had read over some of the semiotics in the story. According to Moon (1992: 139) semiotics are forms of text analysis that analysis social systems of signs. I knew it was set in Russia but I initially did not connect the place with the time period. Being a student of modern history I know extensively

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I realized that what mattered in the struggle for existence was to overcome my fear of those who were stronger.

~ A Precocious Autobiography ~

The Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, is the author of A Precocious Autobiography. It is an account of the consequences of his very first piece of poetry as a youth in Moscow. This text is shaped greatly by reading practises and is rich in the use of semiotics. It is interesting to discuss the ways in which these two things shape the narrative as a whole. To begin with there are many examples of signifier and signified within A Precocious Autobiography. Perhaps the most obvious, the ‘brass knuckles’ of Red, signifies the dominance and strength that the character possess on the street over everyone else. Similarly, naming Red’s followers as ‘Lieutenants’ and the phrase ‘The ruler of our street’ signifies that he is at the top of the street’s hierarchy. As a reader, this negative view of Red immediately made me consider him as a villain. My literary repertoire contains knowledge of many plotlines about apposing power and corrupt